Jaron Lanier: 'The online Utopia doesn't exist. We need to reboot'

This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Sometimes you screw up. I was part of the first generation of cyberculture that articulated the ideals of making information free, of open file-sharing, and of volunteerism in online life. We now know enough, based on real-world results, to realise that we have to move on and find better ideas.

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As a musician, I used to complain bitterly about labels, and I was sure our digital disruptions would create a better world. When we finally got our way, I instead saw a substantial middle-class industry of session musicians and sales clerks disappear. I saw beloved and renowned musicians face insecurity in middle age, unless they had achieved genuine stardom. Similarly, I saw fantastic wealth concentrate around a few companies in California while overall the developed world wallowed in recession. We didn't create a golden age but a gilded age.

Even worse, I myself continued to work on technologies that could extend the same transformations to other, even bigger industries. We are already seeing self-driving vehicles that will eventually put taxi and truck drivers out of work. Automated systems have already been demonstrated that can do approximately what legal researchers, pharmacists and biology researchers do. Technologists are supposed to enable new kinds of jobs even as we make old jobs obsolete. But if we make information "free", what kinds of jobs can survive in the new economy, the information economy?

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Whoever has the best and most connected computer can simply calculate wealth. It's remarkable that the rise of digital networking corresponded to financial crises in the developed world.Jaron Lanier

Why did the ideal of open sharing fail? Because it ignored the nature of computation. If a bunch of people without a computer network are sharing openly, there might be problems -- as the history of socialistic experiments has taught us. But on the other hand, at least in special circumstances, there's no guarantee they will fail. If those same people have a computer network, however, then there IS a guarantee that whoever among them has the biggest and best-connected computer will gain information superiority. That means limitless wealth and influence for that lucky computer's owner and the onset of insecurity, austerity and unemployment for everyone else.

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Companies such as Google and Facebook arose to organise all the information freely shared by ordinary people, but the result is not widespread employment. What happens instead is a new kind of wealth concentration. Ordinary people DO get benefits in this regime, but they are the benefits of an informal economy, not a first-world economy: you can show off, and a token number of people will find rewards for having done so. Occasionally a Kickstarter project or YouTube video will bring a windfall, but overall, only a tiny, token number of people will benefit from the system. The rest live in hope.

The same pattern has overtaken the financial sector.

Whoever has the best and most connected computer can simply calculate wealth. It's remarkable that the rise of digital networking corresponded to financial crises in the developed world.

Shouldn't we have expected the opposite result? If you free yourself from the labels, you will find that too-big-to-fail, automated finance schemes are related to the schemes that shrunk the music business.

It's difficult for me to accept that the ideas of my sweet youth aren't working, but fortunately there are other ideas available to test, and there is no need for despair. The dawn of digital media was filled with ideas that need to be rediscovered.

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Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext (the "HT" in HTML) conceived of digital networks as a universal micropayment scheme. In such a scheme, a person with a popular blog might be able to earn a few pounds. Similarly, a financier would have to pay for the information necessary to leverage someone's home. The government would have to pay for information gained from street cameras or snooping operations. The result of this path not taken might be a more moderate world, with less income concentration, more considered uses of other peoples' data and a strong middle class, even when automation becomes very widespread. Without a strong middle class, democracy eventually withers.

It is time to accept that the open ideal is failing, and that there are other paths to explore.